I can’t really sum up the last 10 years in 140 characters. Besides, it seems somewhat offhand to just serve out my whole twenties in such a way. Of course, I can’t write it all down either (and frankly neither would I want to, it would go on for, well, years). So here is a little summary (in no particular order).

I have watched and read far too many murder mysteries.
I have read far more books than I own.
I have started, but not finished, a creative writing course.
I haven’t even started the garden design course which resides in my cupboard.
I have changed career once, but had many jobs. (Doesn’t that sound like the beginning of a riddle?)
I have moved three times (which may not sound like much but that’s all within the last three years) and bought one flat.
I have owned three cars, and now none.
I have visited the USA, Switzerland, France, The Netherlands, Greece, Spain & Ireland. I have been to the desert and survived.
I have fallen in love twice and had my heart broken twice. And I have lost someone I could have loved if he had been able to cope with the world.
I have, on occasion, lost hope but fortunately always found it again.
I have stayed up & watched the sun rise on countless, messy occasions.
I have also stayed up and ignored the sun rise on countless, messy occasions.
I have made many friends who I hope I will always know.
Then again, I have met some people I’d rather not know.
I have cried at numerous films, either because the really were that bad, or because they made my heart swell up with sadness.
I have acquired a second cat and borrowed two more for a while.
As far as I remember, I have not danced the funky chicken dance. And nor do I intend to.
I am not where I thought I would be. But I have had many adventures on the way.
I’ve dyed, cut, grown, dyed, grown, cut etc. my hair.
I’ve started wearing contact lenses and glasses but I do miss being able to see without them.
I have broken a surprisingly large quantity of wine glasses.
I have changed my mind about tea, it’s actually rather nice.
I haven’t changed my mind about chocolate, or biscuits, or cakes. For which I regularly receive looks of shock and horror.
I have made any number of mistakes, but once I’ve cleared up the mess I realise I’ve learnt from them.
I have had six good years, two amazing years, one bad year and one year I’d like to burn, where is that desert when you need it?

So thank you to those people who made it what it was; you know who you are.

This year’s event focused on “Designing for Tomorrow”, kicking off with a round of workshops ranging from designing for mobile experiences to hardware hacking with arduino sets. As usual, I don’t really get a chance to spend much time in the workshops but was pleased to see how much people were enjoying them.

I think skipping the pre-party this year helped me keep calm for the morning of the conference. Even the Dome staff were impressed with my level of tranquility! The volunteers pulled off a fantastically smooth registration and set the day off without a hitch. With UX London finishing just a few months before this year’s dConstruct, and with other stresses and strains this summer, I feared that there were bound to be things I’d missed. Fortunately if there were, they were so easily dealt with that I didn’t notice. As with all events, there are certain issues you can prepare for and some that you don’t necessarily expect; we had more of the former than the latter which makes my stress load much lighter.

I missed a couple of talks this year, so will eagerly await the podcasts to catch up. It was good to see so much discussion around the topics throughout the day and as I obviously keep an eye on Twitter, to see these discussions progressing after the event. To see attendees inspired and taking experiences home with them shows that the conference achieves what we hope for, to give something back to the community.

Now I have a small conference break and am back to managing the exciting new projects we have coming up, before I start planning for next year’s UX London.

Either way, adjustments must be made.  For the past two weeks I have been making several adjustments, slowly; sometimes with careful thought and sometimes trying hard not to think.  There will be many changes to come and new plans to make; new directions to seek out and new adventures.  No matter what has happened, it’s always difficult not to be excited by the future.

Two weeks on and we now finally have a working bathroom.  Although not finished, we have the essentials plumbed in and a particularly splendid bath which makes the entire experience worthwhile.  (It was certainly an *experience*!)  It has been a pretty ghastly couple of weeks.  I expected to find the lack of heating the biggest problem, but being squished into about a square foot of free sofa space and being surrounded by dust, dirt and a bathroom suite really did get to me.

We did the sensible thing and stayed in a hotel for the first weekend.  After a root around we decided on the Lansdowne Place Hotel, over on the Hove side of town.  It was nice (it had a bath!) and fairly reasonable for a mid-range hotel in Brighton.  There were a couple of things which let it down, but to be honest the hot running water put these into perspective for me and breakfast in bed certainly helped.

It’s odd staying in a hotel in your home town.  You’re away from home and yet there you are, bang in the middle of where you spend every day.  Walking into town, I actually looked around me rather than glazing over and wandering on auto pilot.  It was nice to walk “home” along the seafront rather than strolling in the opposite direction as usual.  It made me realise that ever since moving to Brighton eleven years ago, I have always lived in the same area.  It was refreshing to see Brighton from a different angle for a change.

My main feeling was that 2008 was a year of adjustment.  May was my first Clearleft birthday, and I noticed that I was really starting to feel comfortable in my new career and had adjusted to the new stresses and strains of project management and conference production.  Come August it was time to move and relocate the cats – 2008’s major adjustment.  The amalgamation of stuff has been a long winded affair, there’s still a little of my stuff back at the flat, but the majority has now been integrated into Rosehill.  This means I feel a lot more settled now, rather than a half-guest-hybrid as I did on occasion in the first months. The cats of course, are another matter and one I want to write about more deeply in another post.  A fragile arrangement has come about where Horace & Monty rule the upstairs and Zack & Zeke the sitting room.  There are occasional scuffles and sorties into the opposition’s territory but on the whole they are much more settled now.  My current adjustment is dealing with the dust, lack of hot water and toilet and the general disarray in the house whilst the new bathroom is fitted.  Boy will I be pleased when that’s finished!

I noticed I travelled far less in 2008 – the fantastic Lift in Geneva in February and then off to Greece and Halkidiki in September – was a considerable drop from 2007.  I am looking forward to heading back to the States and SXSW in March though and would love to head back to Black Rock City.  Oddly, I’ve missed airports.  (Yeah, I know, that is weird!)

I don’t really have any resolutions for 2009 but there are things I’d certainly like to do more of.  And of course, there’s that whole “jumping out of a plane before I’m 30!” thing – but more on that another day.

There’s going to be lots to organise in the run up to June, so I’m starting to plan for this now.  Fortunately last year’s dConstruct doesn’t seem too long ago and so I don’t feel there’s a huge amount to remind myself of before I get stuck in.

They are both very different conferences, so I’m looking forward to seeing how UXLondon differs in terms of organisation.  There’s the obvious distance issue – London rather than just around the corner at the Dome.  UXLondon is also aimed at a very different audience, as Andy mentions.  It is really exciting to see it really start to take shape now and I have to say, what a fantastic line up!

On another Clearleft note – we’re looking for an new intern to come and join us.  This will be the third internship we’ve run since summer last year and are finding them really beneficial, as have our interns. Yay!

So a couple of weeks ago I decided it was time for a new wormery.  I do like our wormey familiars, they provide the lovely fertilizer for all those bulbs I’ve been planting recently and it’s also a lovely way to recycle all those kitchen scraps.

It takes a couple of weeks for the worms to get settled into their new home, but from this Wednesday we can start to feed them proper food.  In winter they eat a lot less, so it’s going to be a slow start, making sure we’re not overfeeding them again.  In a couple of months we’ll start to get the liquid fertilizer from the wormery, just in time for all the crocus, daffs, snowdrops, bluebells, tulips, irises and alliums I’ve been busily planting.

I’ve got my fingers crossed that the garden does fill with all these flowers.  I’m a little unsure of the quality of the soil, although this years summer plants did well (until the slugs got them anyway).  There’s still lots of ivy removal that needs to be done before spring, and the buddlea needs to be trimmed back.  With any luck, come March/April the garden with be alive with colour, rather than alive with fighting cats.

Despite what I may have said at the time, the few weeks and days before the event are what really makes me tick.  This was something I missed last year, being in the desert coping with a separate set of extremes.  There is something about the last minute panics, those problems you find you can do nothing about and of course watching the all those plans finally fall into place which makes the whole event for me.

This obviously means that I’m really pleased that we’ll be running another conference next year.  Running along different lines, a much more focussed three day event, UX London will taking place in London next summer.  It’s that bit further from home, which I’m sure will throw up a few logistical challenges: I can’t just run back to the office!  We have a fantastic line up, with Don Norman, Jared Spool and Jeff Veen to name but a few.  Just a little extra pressure then!   I am really looking forward to turning my hand to something a little different though.

Life at Clearleft has turned back to it’s normal pace now.  We’re working on some improvements to Silverback, working on some interesting projects and have been wrestling with the Agile UX bear.  I’m also going to be heading off to Future of Web Apps later this week, and Future of Mobile in November and am really looking forward to finally jetting off to SXSW next March.  A normal pace but not all that quiet; just how I like it.

I’ve spent the last two hours sorting through my wardrobes and realising how many clothes I have that I simply never wear.  Of course, this would be the perfect opportunity to throw things out, and I have made a bit of a dent but I’m hanging on to what is a terrifingly large amount of jeans and jumpers because, quite frankly, you can never have enough of them.

Next up is the kitchen, I’m quite determind to hang on to a large amount of kitchen implements too.  You may be starting to suspect that I’m finding it quite difficult to let go of “my stuff”, and you could be right.  I however, have a perfectly good reason for this.  My stuff is just plain better!  Well, I might get away with that for some things anyway.

Despite the hoards of boxes and the prospect of deciding over which iron irons best, which kettle boils fastest and which toaster you can fit more bread into, I’m really looking forward to moving.  I will miss my little flat.  Unlike my last house, I’m the only person who’s lived her.  And it’s all mine, my first mortgage.  I was somewhat apprehensive at first, a mortgage means that you’re old, finally grown up.  In all honesty though it’s been no different to paying rent.  Well, except I suspect a landlord wouldn’t let me get away with chinese dragon wallpaper.  I shall be keeping hold of it though and renting it out for the foreseeable future and so can still call it “my little flat”.

Once I’ve got the kitchen packed, I’m going sit back and spend the rest of the evening bathing in the nostalgia, spending what could well be my last night here.  I shall settle down with a cold one, lie back on the sofa and trawl through the memories, before stepping on to the next adventure.

The build up to dConstruct is always exciting and with two months to go I can already feel it start to bubble.  I’m really looking forward to this year’s event and the fact that, without last year’s EPIC travel FAIL, I will actually be here!  There’s no dashing off to the desert for me, although I am going to miss being at the Burn this year.  Who’d have thought I’d miss that dust?

Conference aside, it’s been an emotional couple of months.  On a philosophical note, I guess you can never have the really good up’s without the really horrible down’s.  To fit both into two months has been, shall we say “interesting”.  It is really good to be feeling more myself again.  It’s also been lovely to stop and catch up with the world.

What would I take out of the past six weeks?  Well, I guess much of it is pretty obvious really.  Friends are great, wine is probably best drunk in moderation (I still haven’t made up my mind on that one!), and sometimes you just need a really big kick up the proverbial.

There: no earth-shattering gems from me I’m afraid; but I do recommend that people watch out for curbs – they have a nasty habit of attacking you when you least expect it and causing post-gig ankle injuries.